Unexpected

Chapter 11

            Loki had woken early in the next morning and being unable to fall back asleep, got up before the sun. He'd left a note for Sif to find when she woke saying that she could find him in his study later if she so chose. Then he left.

Aimlessly, Loki found himself tracing a worn path amidst the forest floor, the dim light cast just before sunrise catching his boots. Mist rose around him into the air and a light breeze brushed over moss covered logs, lapping at the end of his cape as it flitted about his ankles. His eyes stared through the ground, hands clasped tightly behind his back, while his mind jumped from thought to thought.

He'd woken up feeling off but couldn't place why. His dreams last night had been somewhat disturbing and left him with an uncomfortable knot in his stomach. He recalled waking to a naked Sif laying beside him in the darkness of his chamber. He'd tried to go back to sleep but kept feeling his eye lids being pulled back open each time he tried closing them. Eventually, he gave up and decided to start his day early. He rose from bed, conjured a casual leather clad set and donned a hooded deep emerald cloak. At the balcony, he looked out over the city searching for somewhere to go, but nowhere seemed appealing, so he spun the wheel of destinations in his mind and blinked to the first spot that popped in his mind: a wooded glen that lay waiting miles from the palace.

He'd not been here in some time but remembered the beauty of this place and the tranquility it promised. Loki made his way between the towering mountains navigating the simple maze of oaks that littered his path. The short hike brought him up to a cliff's edge that overlooked a vast landscape of mountains and forest which were abruptly cut off by the sea and from the sea sprouted the first inklings of sunlight peaking up over the rim of their world.

A million thoughts filtered through Loki's mind as he stared blankly toward the rising star, every one of them unsettling him more than the last, some even bringing him to the edge of vomiting. He foraged through the archive of his mind, trying to recall the things he'd dreamt of the night before that seemed to be bringing him such malaise, but the details were lost to him now and all he could summon were emotional blips of loss, rage and fear. He hated feeling like this, he felt weak. For some time, Loki found himself playing on bitter notes of irritation and stubbornness. Déjà vu clipped into his mind, seemingly out of nowhere, as the memory of his teenage-self insulting Sif at the fountain so many decades before played in his mind. He realized that he had fallen in his brother's footsteps despite his desperate attempts to avoid such things and was now involved with the same woman Thor had been centuries before. Anger colored his mind at the notion that he would make the same mistakes as Thor, and he briefly considered the thought of icing Sif entirely for bringing such fragility out of him.

Loki stewed in the confusion of his feelings for hours, pacing as the sun rose, unsure of how to handle what he was feeling, a mixture of joy and anger playing tug-of-war with his brain and threatening to rip him in half at the seams.

-

Sif woke to the sun coming in over the balcony. Her head felt stuffy as if she hadn't slept well and she squinted and blinked at the sun for several minutes before giving up on the possibility of sleeping any longer. Her dreams troubled her, though they sat behind a haze in her mind that prevented her from closely examining their details. All she knew was that she didn't feel good, as if her joy had been stripped from her. Sif rolled over to connect with Loki but only found open space beside her. She lazily inspected the place where he should have been and found that she was hardly surprised that he wasn't there. A lump of embarrassment caught in her throat at the prospect that her deepest assumptions of his actions were true after all. That he had only been tricking her as a means to his own ends and that everything she'd witnessed of him was in fact a trick that he used against her.